Though it’s not available yet in the U.S., the Samsung Galaxy S2 is available in the U.K., and one creative S2 owner has just posted a very impressive video using the phone’s 8-megapixel camera.

Stu Kennedy of kakepip.com shot a time-lapse video of Lincoln, a city in the U.K. Kennedy shot it in 1080p HD and also used a little editing trick called tilt-shift that transforms a normal shot into what looks like miniature toys.

The video is impressive for two reasons. First, it was shot on a cell phone and the quality is fantastic. Kennedy said he was “overwhelmed with the capability of the Galaxy S2” and wanted to do “something cool” with it. You certainly couldn’t create a video like this with a phone camera from even a couple of years ago. (By the way, Samsung announced today that the Galaxy S2 will be available in the U.S. “sometime in August.”)

Secondly, the tilt shift effect is really breathtaking. Tilt-shift is a technique often used in small and medium-format cameras that use tilt for selective focus. However, in the case of the Galaxy S2 camera, the tilt-shift effect was added afterwards with After Effects 5.5. Kennedy used the Time Line feature in After Effects and reduced each clip to 27 percent of its original time. The camera was at 30 fps and he edited it in Vegas 10.

Combined with a song that uses what we believe to be a toy piano, the video has a juvenile feel to it, making the viewer feel like a giant looking down upon a bustling toy land. Kennedy said he stabilized his phone by creating a mount using an old phone case which he glued to a 90-degree bracket. He then used that with a tripod to keep the phone still.

As with most tilt-shift videos, the shots of trains are always really cool, as are the shots of people walking and looking like little toy figurines. You can even see some shadows from the clouds move across the lawn if you look carefully enough.

The tilt-shift technique was recently used by David Fincher in the movieThe Social Network during the Henley Royal Regatta Race. Check out the video below to see the effect done for the big screen.